September 02, 2026

Feel It Once

Suppose a man is pierced by an arrow, and, following the first piercing, he is pierced by a second arrow, so that he feels a feeling caused by two arrows.

Bhikkhu Bodhi, an American-born monk who has spent much of his life translating the Pali Canon into modern English, brought this teaching into wide circulation through his rendering of the Sallatha Sutta, one of the Buddha's early discourses on feeling. In it the Buddha compares an ordinary reaction to pain to being struck by two arrows in a row: the first is the unavoidable sting of the event itself, the second is the grief, blame, and replaying we shoot into ourselves afterward. The passage makes the distinction exact — the same physical pain can be felt once, cleanly, or doubled by a mind that adds a story to it. In the Buddhist tradition this is not a call to suppress feeling but a training in noticing the split second where a sensation turns into a narrative. Meditation practice is largely the repeated act of catching that second arrow before it is loosed and choosing, instead, to simply feel what is already there.

A principle of Eastern Wisdom: The Second Arrow →